ART

ART; Works bythe New and by the Eccentric

By VIVIEN RAYNOR

Published: May 22, 1988

CONNECTICUT has not lacked for up-to-date art: the Matrix Gallery of the Wadsworth Atheneum and the alternative space Real Art Ways have seen to that for a decade or more. All the same, new heights have been scaled with the appointment of Klaus Ottmann as curator of exhibitions for the Zilkha Gallery, at Wesleyan University, in Middletown.

A contributor to magazines ranging from Flash Art to Harper's Bazaar, Mr. Ottmann presumably represents an infusion of young, exotic blood, for he brings with him an M.F.A. that is only eight years old and that was obtained at the Freie Universitat, in Berlin. More important, though, is his espousal of the still-hot Neo-Geo, or Simulationist, artists who have drawn inspiration from such post-modernist philosophers as Gaston Baudrillard (despite his repudiation of their work and of art-making generally).

''Complexity and Contradiction'' is Mr. Ottmann's maiden show at Zilkha, and it comes with a short introduction written in art Esperanto. This defies paraphrasing, but the following quote should be enough to convey its drift: ''The redux of simplism in art corresponds to the triumph of the digital switch, in compliance with the economics of war, over the analogue cybernetic computer during the 1940's, the exclusion of contradiction and multiplicity for the binary logic of tertium non datur.'' As for the works in the show, Mr. Ottmann explains that they ''are in a state of fractal delirium achieving a synthesis between chaos and geometry that does not cancel contradiction and in which every part is defined without reducing complexity.'' Which just goes to show that the harder museums and corporations try to bring art to the masses, the more artists and their explicators must strive to keep it beyond their comprehension (if not their reach).

The show, which consists of works by Ellen Carey, Lydia Dona, John Lamka, William Stone and David Wilson, is not especially remote but it is a wee bit boring. However, Mr. Stone's constructions with lightbulbs (ecole de R. M. Fischer) quicken the pulse, especially the one that's a sarcophagus painted with faux Egyptian hieroglyphics and occupied by a tall lamp with plastic protecting its shade. Only slightly less hideous are Mr. Lamka's large, whitish canvases, each marked with a pair of quartered circles. Some of these segments contain vague shapes screened in colored dots; one encloses a row of black numerals.

Next in this ascending order of merit are the abstractions of Ms. Dona, which are pleasant images suggesting the innards of electronic devices. In one, the shapes are mostly grays and light greens on a darker green ground; in the other, they are mostly black, blue and gray on a red ground. After these, come the enormous cibachrome prints of Ms. Carey, one of the group's better-known contributors. The most striking of the two pictures is a large head made up of countless small heads, all of them portraits of the same woman against a background decorated with Op patterns.

Strangely enough, more than half the works in the show are by the same artist, Mr. Wilson, who transfers photographic reproductions of, say, Gothic and classical architecture onto tiny canvases, adding occasional touches of thin paint. They are dingy little pictures with fussed-over surfaces but they are not without a certain nostalgic charm. Is it possible that the curator is the biggest contradiction of all - a promoter of the new hard-nosed art who secretly cherishes the old, soft-nosed kind?

The show is a miscellany that might have been better titled ''Indolence and Inertia.''

''Self-Taught and Not,'' at Real Art Ways, is more fun than the Zilkha event but it, too, reflects a mildly ominous trend. However, the trend is not in art but in its evaluation, and it may well be part of the general move to get everything - information and people - tidied away into systems of one kind or another. As the guest curator, Carole Celentano, explains in her statement, the show ''aims to define a single perspective for viewing works of art,'' whether their makers are trained or not. Presumably, this means that ''Outsider,'' which subsumed ''naive'' and ''primitive,'' is about to be subsumed by an even more irritating term. It may also mean that distinctions made on the basis of an artist's sanity - or lack of it - will eventually be punishable.

For the time being, though, viewers are free to wonder how much of Martin Ramirez's genius was the result of his incarceration as a paranoid schizophrenic. The show includes one of the Mexican artist's superb drawings that is a work of pre-Columbian art, notwithstanding the mounted cowboy at its center. No less staggering in its intricacy and beauty are the colored-pencil compositions packed with figures, faces, abstract forms and German words that are the work of Adolf Wolfli, who was afflicted in the same way.

If some of the greatest untutored art has been done by the untranquilized insane, the next best seems to be the product of eccentrics. A notable example is the reclusive Scottie Wilson, whose densely hatched shapes -half heraldry, half personages - are among the best in the show.

Since being a blue-collar worker turned folk artist is in itself a form of eccentricity, Steve Ashby qualifies, and so does Miles Carpenter. The first, who was included in the Corcoran Gallery of Art's black folk art show some years back, did the lovely figure of a seated woman that is assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, out of carved elements; the second is responsible for the imaginary anteater carved from tree branches and painted pink.

There's never been any doubt about the effect that art by the untrained, the unhinged and the uncivilized had on Modernism. So the presence of such trained eccentrics as Jim Nutt is appropriate. But there's no way Mr. Nutt's drawing of two nude, more or less female figures, William Copley's painted cartoon of a tryst in Paris, Ed Paschke's head of a man with small lenses laid over his eyes or the faux-naive machine men by Carl Wirsum can be confused with the real thing. The show is terrific, but its populist premise is ridiculous.

''Complexity and Contradiction'' remains on view at the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University in Middletown through June 5. ''Self-Taught and Not'' is at Real Art Ways, 94 Allyn Street, Hartford, through May 28.